"Sometimes it was really easy to find cheats, because the code was very straightforward, and sometimes it was a massive pain in the arse," recalls Jon. "In simple terms, if a game started you with three lives I'd set up the logic analyser to stop when it found the value three being written to RAM. Then I'd use the Game Genie to change that 3 to say a 5, reboot the game and see if I started with 5 lives. If not, then I'd let it find the next time it wrote 3 into RAM and try that.

"Infinite lives codes were always the best. Once I'd found where in RAM the lives value was stored I'd then monitor when it got decremented. What I was looking for was where the game's original coder used -most likely - the DEC A (&H3D) instruction after reading the lives value from RAM, and then storing it back into RAM. If I found this then all I had to do was swap out the DEC A (&H3D) decrement operation with a NOP (&H00), which performed no operation. So the lives value would be left as-is and voila the player had infinite lives."

According to the report, an average of 51% of adults and 72% of minors in the EU have pirated digital content, with Poland and Spain averaging the highest rates of all countries surveyed. Nevertheless, displacement rates (the impact of piracy on legitimate sales) were found to be negligible or non-existent for music, books and games, while rates for films and TV were in line with previous digital piracy studies.

Most interesting is the fact that the study found that illegal game downloads actually lead to an increase in legal purchases. The report concludes that tactics like video game microtransactions are proving effective in converting illegal users to paying users.

The full report goes in-depth regarding potential factors influencing piracy and the challenges of accurately tracking its impact on legitimate sales, but the researchers ultimately conclude that there is no robust statistical evidence that illegal downloads reduce legal sales. That's big news, which makes it all the more troubling that the EU effectively buried it for two years.

Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip. While the sound effects1 produced by this 1978 chip seem primitive today, it was used in many video games, pinball games. But what's inside this chip and how does it work internally? By reverse-engineering the chip from die photos, we can find out. (Photos courtesy of Sean Riddle.) In this article, I explain how the analog circuits of this chip works and show how the hundreds of transistors on the silicon die form the circuits of this complex chip.

One of the most famous attributes of Lord British is that he is almost invincible. In every Ultima game in which he has appeared, he is designed to be almost impervious to a player's character predations. However, there are ways for a player thinking outside the box to assassinate him. This phenomenon is the origin of the Lord British Postulate which states: "If it exists as a living creature in an MMORPG, someone, somewhere, will try to kill it."[7] Virtually every MMO game displays numerous instances of this, with players attempting to kill (or, in the case of friendly NPCs, cause the death of) virtually every NPC or monster, howsoever powerful, meek, friendly, or ethereal.

The object of Dinosaur Escape is to get all three dinosaurs safely to Dinosaur Island before the volcano erupts! Work together to move the dinosaur movers around the board and uncover the matching dinosaurs under the fern tokens.

On your turn, roll the die. If you roll a number, move any dinosaur mover the indicated number of spaces any direction on the path. Then turn over one fern token anywhere on the board. If you reveal rocks, bones or other items, flip the token back over. If you reveal a dinosaur, and the dinosaur mover of the same species is in the same habitat area, move the dinosaur moved and matching token to Dinosaur Island. You just helped a dinosaur escape!

If you reveal a dinosaur but the dinosaur mover of the same species is not in the same habitat as the token, flip the token back over. Dinosaur movers and matching tokens must be in the same habitat to help a dinosaur escape! If you turn over the T-Rex, RUN! Move each of the dinosaur movers in play back to a start space. If you roll a volcano, place volcano piece number 1 in the stand on the board. If you can find and help all three lost dinosaurs escape to Dinosaur Island before completing the 3D volcano puzzle, you all win!

Our cute segregation sim is based off the work of Nobel Prize-winning game theorist, Thomas Schelling. Specifically, his 1971 paper, Dynamic Models of Segregation. We built on top of this, and showed how a small demand for diversity can desegregate a neighborhood. In other words, we gave his model a happy ending.

Tetsuya Nomura (Character and battle visual director, Square Japan): OK, so maybe I did kill Aerith. But if I hadn’t stopped you, in the second half of the game, you were planning to kill everyone off but the final three characters the player chooses!

Football Manager includes what is effectively a parallel universe, so they modelled the effects of Brexit on the UK Premier League:

'In my own current “save”, Brexit kicked in at the end of season three. Unfortunately I got one of the hard options, where all non-homegrown players are now going through a work permit system, albeit one that’s slightly relaxed. It means I can no longer bring in that 19-year-old Italian keeper I’d been eyeing up as one for the future. Instead I have to wait for him to break into the Italian squad, and play 30% of their fixtures over the next two years. Then he’ll be mine. Meanwhile, my TV revenue has just dropped by a few million. Let’s hope that doesn’t continue, or I won’t even be able to afford him.'

I'm not remotely interested in shockingly good graphics, in murder simulators, in guns and knives and swords. I'm not that interested in adrenaline. My own life is thrilling enough. There is enough fear and hatred in the world to get my heart pounding. My Facebook feed and Twitter feed are enough for that. Walking outside in summer clothing is enough for that. I'm interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I'm interested in connecting. As Miranda July said, "all I ever wanted to know is how other people are making it through life." I want to make games that help other people understand life.

We are all overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change. The degree of interactivity in our lives is amazing and wonderful and I wouldn't exchange it for anything, but it is also shocking and overwhelming and it's causing us to dig in and try to find some peace by shutting each other out. On all sides of the political spectrum we've stopped listening to each other and I fear we are all leaning toward fascist thinking. We should be using this medium to help us adapt to our new, interactive lives. This is how we become relevant.

Anecdotal evidence has suggested simulator sickness is less intense when games contain fixed visual reference objects - such as a racecar's dashboard or an airplane's cockpit - located within the user's field of view. "But you can't have a cockpit in every VR simulation," Whittinghill said.

His research team was studying the problem when undergraduate student Bradley Ziegler suggested inserting the image of a virtual human nose in the center of the video display. "It was a stroke of genius," said Whittinghill, who teaches video game design. "You are constantly seeing your own nose. You tune it out, but it's still there, perhaps giving you a frame of reference to help ground you." The researchers have discovered that the virtual nose, or "nasum virtualis," reduces simulator sickness when inserted into popular games.

“ ‘What would the robot do?’ is now the key question in Scrabble,” said Mr. Fatsis. Often, he said, the robot plays five letters: “There are inefficiencies in the game that you can exploit by having a mastery of those intermediate-length words.”

PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and other computer programs. When you turn it on, the machine greets you with a shell for typing in Lua commands and provides simple built-in tools for creating your own cartridges.

So cute! See also Voxatron, something similar for voxel-oriented 3D gaming

Unlike machines in the West, every single machine that was produced during Soviet-era Russia had to align with Marxist ideology. [...] The most popular games were created to teach hand-eye coordination, reaction speed, and logical, focused thinking. Not unlike many American games, these games were influenced by military training, crafted to teach and instill patriotism for the state by making the human body better, stronger, and more willful. It also means no high scores, no adrenaline rushes, or self-serving feather-fluffing as you add your hard-earned initials to the list of the best. In Communist Russia, there was no overt competition.

My account got hacked, running up over $600 in charges. Here's the conclusion after running through the Sony support gauntlet.
They can only refund up to $150.
I can dispute the charges with my bank, but that will result in my account being banned.
I cannot unban my account, and will thus lose my purchases ("but you only have the Last of Us and some of our free games, so it's not a big deal")
Whomever hacked my account deactivated my PS4, and activated their own. Customer support will only permit one activation every 6 months. I'm locked out of logging into my own account on my PS4 for six months.

Fantastic 1997-era book of interviews with the programmers behind some of the greatest games in retrogaming history:

Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers was released as a commercial product in March 1997. At the time it was one of the first retrogaming projects to focus on lost history rather than game collecting, and certainly the first entirely devoted to the game authors themselves. Now a good number of the interviewees have their own web sites, but none of them did when I started contacting them in 1995. [...] If you have any of the giddy anticipation that I did whenever I picked up a magazine containing an interview with Mark Turmell or Dan [M.U.L.E.] Bunten, then you want to start reading.

'If it works, a copy of Burgertime for DOS is now in your browser, clickable from my entry. If it doesn’t… well, no Burgertime for you. (Unless you visit the page.) There’s a “share this” link in the new archive.org interface for sharing these in-browser emulations in web pages, weblogs and who knows what else.'

The testers at [MAJOR PUBLISHER] had just finished wrapping up testing on a project we'll call "Biolands." And to congratulate them, the man in charge arranged a huge bowling/pizza party for the end of the week. Of course everyone is hyped for the event. So the day finally arrives and all the testers show up. They all start bowling and eating pizza. After a few hours of everyone enjoying themselves, the VP asks for everyone's attention. When he does manage to get the team to listen, he begins to thank them for their hard work and has the leads hand them their termination papers.

And many other horror stories from the worst software industry of all -- games.

Via negatendo: 'I would like to share my excitement about the fact that after almost a year of development, an instance of my NetHack bot has finally managed to ascend a game for the first time without human interventions, wizard mode cheats or bones stuffing, and did so at the public server at acehack.de.'

The bot is written in Clojure. Apparently 'pudding farming' did the trick...

Via Walter, the best description of the appeal of Minecraft I've read:

Minecraft is exceptionally good at intrinsic narrative. It recognises, preserves and rewards everything you do. It presses you to play frontiersman. A Minecraft world ends up dotted with torchlit paths, menhirs, landmarks, emergency caches. Here’s the hole where you dug stone for your first house. Here’s the causeway you built from your spawn point to a handy woodland. Here’s the crater in the landscape where the exploding monster took out you and your wheatfield at once. And, of course, here’s your enormous castle above a waterfall. There’s no utility in building anything bigger than a hut, but the temptations of architecture are irresistible. Minecraft isn’t so much a world generator as a screenshot-generator and a war-story generator.

This is what will get the game the bulk of its critical attention, and deservedly so. That’s why I want to call attention to the extrinsic narrative. It’s minimal, implicit, accidental and very powerful. It’s this: you wake alone beside an endless sea in a pristine, infinite wilderness. The world is yours. You can literally sculpt mountains, with time and effort. You’ll die and be reborn on the beach where you woke first. You’ll walk across the world forever and never see another face. You can build a whole empire of roads and palaces and beacon towers, and the population of that empire will only ever be you. When you leave, your towers will stand empty forever. I haven’t seen that surfaced in a game before. It’s strong wine.

We also wanted the Rouge to actually look like a stealth-oriented make-up artist, but our 3D artist thought the goat looked ridiculous with a pink wig and a Gucci bag, so we remade the Rouge to actually look like a Rogue.

I'm ambivalent about Microsoft acquiring Mojang. Will they Embrace and Extend Minecraft as they've done with other categories? Let's hope not. On the other hand, some adult supervision and a Plugin API would be welcome. Mojang have the financial resources but lack the will and focus needed to publish and support a Plugin API. Perhaps Mojang themselves don't realise just how important their little game has become.

a few GIFs of procedurally generated architecture by a game developer named Cedric, built using Unity. Cedric describes himself as an "indie game dev focused on social AI, emergent narrative and procedural worlds." Imagine whole game worlds powered by real-time computation at the building level, constantly and parametrically fizzing with architectural forms, barely predictable new Woolworth Buildings and Barbicans sprouting on-demand from the ground whenever needed.

I've become accustomed to RPGs that lock away combat and magic within their own part of the game. I'm used to the idea that a fireball won't work unless it's aimed at an enemy, or that every environmental hazard will be placed such that I'm guaranteed to be able to get past it. I'm used to the idea that some characters can be killed and some can't, that some obstacles are destructible and others are 'just furniture'. Divinity shrugs off those assumptions. Combat might be turn-based when you're fighting an enemy, but there's nothing stopping you from waving your sword around in the middle of town. Fling a fireball at some innocent barrels and you'll start a fresh fire of your own, and this time the locals won't be applauding when you rush to put it out.

Teaches the basics of computer science - K-8 Intro to CS, 15-25 hours. Introduces core CS and programming concepts, with lots of nice graphics, scenarios and characters from games to get the kids hooked ;) Recommended by Tom Raftery; his youngest (7yo) is having great fun with it.

The group of gamers responsible for half of all in-game revenue in mobile titles is frightening because it is so narrow, according to a survey by Swrve, an established analytics and app marketing firm. About 0.15 percent of mobile gamers contribute 50 percent of all of the in-app purchases generated in free-to-play games.

This means it may even more important than game companies realized in the past to find and retain the users that fall into the category of big spenders, or “whales.” The vast majority of users never spend any money, despite the clever tactics that game publishers have developed to incentivize people to spend money in their favorite games.

This sounds amazing. I hope it makes it to some kind of "semi-finished".

A semi-roguelike game inspired by Jorge Borges, Umberto Eco, Neal Stephenson, Shadow of the Colossus, Europa Universalis and Civilization. Although currently in its early stages, URR aims to explore several philosophical and sociological issues that both arose during the sixteenth and seventeenth century (when the game is approximately set), and in the present day, whilst almost being a deep, complex and highly challenging roguelike. To do this the game seeks to generate realistic world histories, though ones containing a few unusual happenings and anomalous experiences. The traditional roguelike staple of combat will be rare and deadly – whilst these mechanics will be modeled in detail, exploration, trade and diplomacy factors will have just as much effort put into them.

Suffice it to say that the first minute-and-a-half or so of this [speedrun] is merely an effort to spawn a specific set of sprites into the game's Object Attribute Memory (OAM) buffer in a specific order. The TAS runner then uses a stun glitch to spawn an unused sprite into the game, which in turn causes the system to treat the sprites in that OAM buffer as raw executable code. In this case, that code has been arranged to jump to the memory location for controller data, in essence letting the user insert whatever executable program he or she wants into memory by converting the binary data for precisely ordered button presses into assembly code (interestingly, this data is entered more quickly by simulating the inputs of eight controllers plugged in through simulated multitaps on each controller port).

[MMOGs], the [NSA] analyst wrote, "are an opportunity!". According to the briefing notes, so many different US intelligence agents were conducting operations inside games that a "deconfliction" group was required to ensure they weren't spying on, or interfering with, each other.

beautiful German boardgame, suitable for playing with kids -- an adult moves a tealight candle around the board, while kids take turns moving gnomes around in the shadows behind tall "trees". recommended by JK

In this paper, we have analyzed the performance of TCP in of ShenZhou Online, a commercial, mid-sized MMORPG. Our study indicates that, though TCP is full-fledged and robust, simply transmitting game data over TCP could cause unexpected performance problems. This is due to the following distinctive characteristics of game traffic: 1) tiny packets, 2) low packet rate, 3) application-limited traffic generation, and 4) bi-directional traffic.

We have shown that because TCP was originally designed for unidirectional and network-limited bulk data transfers, it cannot adapt well to MMORPG traffic. In particular, the window-based congestion control mechanism and the fast retransmit algorithm for loss recovery are ineffective. This suggests that the selective acknowledgement option should be enabled whenever TCP is used, as it significantly enhances the loss recovery process. Furthermore, TCP is overkill, as not every game packet needs to be transmitted reliably and processed in an orderly manner. We have also shown that the degraded network performance did impact users' willingness to continue a game. Finally, a number of design guidelines have been proposed by exploiting the unique characteristics of game traffic.

'This article will use NettoSphere, a framework build on top of the popular Netty Framework and Atmosphere with support of WebSockets, Server Side Events and Long-Polling. NettoSphere allows [async JVM framework] Atmosphere's applications to run on top of the Netty Framework.'

This is watching your sharp, witty father start telling old fart jokes as his mind slows down. And as much as the internet is habituated to defending GTA as "satire," what is it satirizing, if everything is either sad or awful? Where is the "satire" when the awful parts no longer seem edgy or provocative, just attempts at catch-all "offense" that aren't honed enough to even connect? Here's a series that has been creating real, meaningful friction with conventional entertainment for as long as I can remember, and rather than push the envelope by creating new kinds of monsters, it's reciting the same old gangland fantasies, like a college boy who can't stop staring at the Godfather II poster on his wall, talking about how he's gonna be a big Hollywood director in between bong rips. You call the trading index BAWSAQ? Oh, bro, you're so funny, you're gonna be huge.

The Long Dark is a thoughtful, first-person survival simulation that emphasizes quiet exploration in a stark, yet hauntingly beautiful, post-disaster setting. The breathtakingly picturesque Pacific Northwest frames the backdrop for the drama of The Long Dark.

Only 5% of toxic behavior comes from toxic people; 77% of it comes from people who are usually good. That finding has all sorts of implications for how to stop toxic behavior in an online community. It’s not enough to just ban the jerks; good people have bad days too. Instead you have to teach the whole community what the community standards are. And quickly identify people who are having a bad day, intervene before their toxicity infects too many other people.

Thunberg's admission that [the E-Sports Entertainment Association client software] ran Bitcoin-mining software without explicit user consent is startling. Aside from potentially opening the company up to huge legal liability, the move is likely to engender distrust among some of the company's most loyal fans. The nonchalance of some of Thunberg's comments may only add insult to the betrayal many users are likely to feel.

"But for the record, I told jag he shouldn't be lazy and run the miner in a separate process," he wrote in a post, referring to one of his software engineers with the screen name Jaguar, who didn't take steps to conceal the Bitcoin miner. "Rookie move." In the later post he wrote: "100% of the funds are going into the s14 prize pot, so at the very least your melted gpus contributed to a good cause."

a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience.

What do you get if you take one accountant with "a fondness for spreadsheets, finance and business" and mix with "a life-long passion for video games"?
Well it's obvious isn't it? A turn-based RPG made and played entirely in Microsoft Excel.

'The unique feature of the Miiverse is being able to send drawings, not just text. But since the advent of the internet, there have always been those who have used it for unsavory purposes.'
<br/>
'Motoyama: we never had such a problem with our Hatena services. But, when we brought Hatena Flipnote to the West, we were caught off-guard by the amount of penises drawn by people.
<br/>
Kurisu: So the team and I had to come up with a way to create a system that auto-detects those types of pictures. [...]
<br/>
'Motoyama: After a week, we made very good progress on the system. Then we tested the system with Nintendo of America and told them to start drawing. It went horribly.
<br/>
Kurisu: What we learned is that people enjoy drawing penises. Multiple ones. (laughs) The system was not prepared to handle that.'

'A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers'. 'SmoothLifeL supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, 'wickstretchers' and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs.' paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567 , and slides: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII

Epic Reddit post. "Parallels to '1984' off the top of my head: 3 superpowers, a "communist" leadership in which technology has reached as far as it needs to go (end of technology tree), barbarian (resistance) uprisings constantly being stomped out by the totalitarian government, nuclear war rendering most farmland useless, constant breaking and reassembling of treaties between the 3 superpowers, seemingly infinite war (due to the previous point), an ever present and all knowing leader making the decisions of the nation..." (via oceanclub)

Membase, surprise answer. In general it sounds like they had a pretty crazy time -- rebuilding the plane in flight even more than usual. "This had us on our toes and working 24 hours a day. I think at one point we were up for around 60-plus hours straight, never leaving the computer. We had to scale out web servers using DNS load balancing, we had to get multiple HAProxies, break tables off MySQL to their own databases, transparently shard tables, and more. This was all being done on demand, live, and usually in the middle of the night. We were very lucky that most of our layers were scalable with little or no major modifications needed. Helping us along the way was our very detailed custom server monitoring tools which allowed us to keep a very close eye on load, memory, and even provided real time usage stats on the game which helped with capacity planning. We eventually ended up with easy to launch "clusters" of our app that included NGINX, HAProxy, and Goliath servers all of which independent of everything else and when launched, increased our capacity by a constant. At this point our drawings per second were in the thousands, and traffic that looked huge a week ago was just a small bump on the current graphs."

An amazing article, via Nelson Minar -- careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering -- by many of the developers. 'Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.'